Using your available resources ( Think outside the box! )
Beau Schwabe
Posts: 6,568
Oldbitcollectors most recent Propeller contest post reminded me of something I did as a kid near lake Wawasee. At the time we were in a remote area and there was no radio shack in town without driving half the day to get there.
Anyway to the point, my friend accidentally dropped his "Jam Box" / "Boom Box" whatever you want to call it and it cracked the circuit board. Late one evening we opened it up and I was able to repair it with a coat hanger and garbage bag twist ties (The older ones with wire running down the spine). Heating the coat hanger on the stove coils, I used the coat hanger to re-flow the solder that was already on the cracked circuit board by following the broken traces and bypassing the cracked region. An hour or so later his radio was good to go!
Just for fun, I would like to hear of other innovative ideas people have had using only common house hold items.
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Beau Schwabe
IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Post Edited (Beau Schwabe (Parallax)) : 2/9/2009 4:56:39 AM GMT
Anyway to the point, my friend accidentally dropped his "Jam Box" / "Boom Box" whatever you want to call it and it cracked the circuit board. Late one evening we opened it up and I was able to repair it with a coat hanger and garbage bag twist ties (The older ones with wire running down the spine). Heating the coat hanger on the stove coils, I used the coat hanger to re-flow the solder that was already on the cracked circuit board by following the broken traces and bypassing the cracked region. An hour or so later his radio was good to go!
Just for fun, I would like to hear of other innovative ideas people have had using only common house hold items.
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Beau Schwabe
IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Post Edited (Beau Schwabe (Parallax)) : 2/9/2009 4:56:39 AM GMT
Comments
My "innovation" story is one more of stupendous good fortune than ingenuity. I was on a river trip in Ontario with a friend in a two-man Klepper kayak. We had found the Ministry of Natural Resources guidebook to be rather too cautious regarding rapids, so when we got to Graveyard Rapids [noparse][[/noparse]cue ominous cello chords] we decided to run them rather than portaging, which latter option the guidebook insisted was the only sane one. (If the name wasn't enough of a deterrent, the snow that began to fall should have been.) We did fine until we hit the dropoff and roller at the bottom, which snapped the seat backs, tossed us like so much laundry, and spit us out with an empty boat and no paddles. We were able to retrieve all our gear downstream, build a fire, and dry everything out. But the paddles were nowhere to be found, and we were many miles from the nearest railroad, let alone any vestiges of human habitation. As providence would have it, further scouting along the riverbank turned up a scrap of 1/4-inch plywood riddled with brass woodscrews, floating in a back eddy! It was all we needed to craft four paddle blades with the Sven Saw we had packed and attach them to a couple sapling trunks. These new homemade paddles were heavy, but they got us down the river and to our pickup point. We never did see the original paddles again. Somebody probably found them, though, figuring the Graveyard had claimed another fool.
-Phil
We got electricity from the railway system to my maid's house using several hundred meters of fencing wire stapled to small blue gum branches that were nailed to posts. That was three years ago and this year her neighbour extended it to his property and the one next door. A bit dangerous by Western standards, particularly because we can't turn the power off.
I've used the repair kit for heated rear windows to fix PCB tracks. It works well (but has a couple of Ohms resistance.
I strip the big old photocopiers for parts. I arrange with the people who live off the rubbish dump to collect the types I want and I pay them US$2.00 each (I pay far too much, I should pay US$0.50 each but I consider it charity). You would be amazed at what useful stuff you get out of just 1 big old photocopier.
I use automotive wire, terminals and connectors. I use automotive Minifuses(TM) and Minifuse blocks. I also use the occasional wiper motor or window motor. The best linear actuator I've ever used was from an automotive door locking system.
Getting the standard electronic boxes for my projects is difficult because of shipping charges. I use a variety of unorthodox boxes ranging from normal switch boxes and plug boxes through Tupperware type containers, computer and network boxes and once even an old Hi Fi cabinet
Kind regards from Darkest Africa
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I had a hand-me-down laptop that appears totally broken and is totally broken but with the exception of the motherboard. I ripped out the board, made connections to a computer monitor, keyboard, DVD drive etc. via the ports on the motherboard and it works perfectly.
I didn't have a suitable container at the time·so I put it in a pizza box (it was clean, since this one used to have a liner that kept the oils out), cut out holes for the cables and ventilation·and it took on a literal pizza box form factor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_box_form_factor)
People kept thinking it actually had pizza in it because the box was always warm.
I was going to keep it but it had since then been moved into a more "computerish" box.
Post Edited (InSilico) : 2/10/2009 2:46:13 AM GMT